Electroweak Baryogenesis in the LHC Era
| Date/Time: | Thursday, 12 Apr 2012 from 4:10 pm to 5:10 pm |
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| Location: | A401, Zaffarano Hall |
| Contact: | Chunhui Chen |
| Phone: | 515-294-5062 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
Today, cosmologists and high energy particle physicists are engaged in the problem of constructing and studying mechanisms to generate the baryon asymmetry of the universe that are both compelling and testable.The mechanism of electroweak baryogenesis provides an especially interesting opportunity to bridge the cosmology of the baryon asymmetry with the particle physics of the Higgs sector, which is currently being explored at the LHC. As it is the mission objective of the LHC to uncover the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking, we are inclined to ask, what are the implications of recent and projected LHC results on the viability of electroweak baryogenesis? Although this question has already been addressed in the context of particular models, I seek to understand the extent to which model-independent statements may be made. To this end, I motivate a scheme for classifying models of electroweak baryogenesis so that the impact of some collider results may be used to constrain models at the level of these equivalence classes, instead of on a case-by-case basis. Furthermore, I discuss the utility of discrete symmetries to highlight favorable limits of a particular class of electroweak baryogenesis models, and I discuss a minimal singlet extension of the SM as a concrete example.